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This blog will initiate you into the world of printers and cartridges. Here you will find recent news, announces, "how-to" articles, videos, as well as interesting and sometimes amazing facts about printing devices, printing technologies and printing supplies.

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Archive for September, 2007

It has been quite a while since I started working on this blog for Toner Cartridge Depot, and I have had enough. I can’t bear it anymore, so I made up my mind to discover the truth about this printing supplies store. Hopefully, what I’m going to tell you saves your precious time and, probably, health.

So, I would not recommend you shopping or even visiting Toner Cartridge Depot for these reasons:

1. Toner Cartridges Depot sports a nifty design

If you firmly believe that appearance is always deceiving, you will likely be shocked to discover the opposite. This means you may be subjected to stressful situation, which may unfavorably affect you health. You’d better stay away from the store.

Having to make a selection from a wide range of cartridges is often stressful too. You may spend a lot of time studying and comparing each item before making a decision, you may even lose your sleep! Why would any man of sense need such problems?

If you cannot accept that someone accepts most popular credit cards – who in the world would do such weird thing, huh? – contact me the soonest, soul mate! Perhaps, together we may find a store that accepts credits cards unknown to general public.

via Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol for transmitting private documents via the Internet. If you cannot live a day without pushing your luck and making insecure transaction over the Internet, this store is unlikely a place for someone like you, sorry.

8. Toner Cartridges Depot never discloses any information it collects from customers

If you innocently want to become famous through leaving your personal data in the hope that someone publishes it, you expectations are never to come true. Sorry about that, too.

9. Toner Cartridges Depot ships using major post services of UPS, FedEx and US Postal Service

If there is any chance that you don’t like these delivery services (like, they ship too fast, and you are not that kind of man who approves of any haste), refrain from shopping with the store for the sake of peace of your mind.

10. Toner Cartridges Depot guarantees 45-Day Money-Back

If you think this is unacceptable to have a whole month and a half to make sure the products are all right, and kind of spoils you as a customer, I would suggest looking for another shop that does not offer a trial period that long.

Well, I tried my best to persuade you from shopping or even visiting TonerCartridgeDepot. End of announcement.

Canon U.S.A. introduced the Selphy ES2 Compact Photo Printer. The printer features “Easy Photo Pack” cartridges that combine ink and paper. It uses USB 2.0 to connect to a Mac or PC and also supports direct connections to PictBridge-enabled cameras. The Selphy ES2 also automatically corrects for red-eye and enhances images for exposure, color and brightness.
The Selphy ES2 sports a 3.0-inch “tilt-up” TFT display that delivers detailed previews of your images before printing. The printer produces from credit card size up to 4 x 6-inch prints at 300 x 300 dots per inch that are water-resistant and can resist fading up to 100 years.

Canon Selphy ES2 employs Canon’s proprietary Easy-Scroll Wheel, a navigation tool that lets you quickly browse and use the functions you want. The device also features built-in memory card readers that work with most commonly used memory cards in digital cameras including CompactFlash, Memory Sticks, MMC, SD Card, SDHC and others.

The printer is coming in October and will cost $199.99.

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The variety of printing supplies available on the market makes us think twice before choosing the right cartridges.

You are an owner of a printer that has been serving you well for a while, and one day you discover you are out of inks. At first sight, it seems easy to remove empty cartridges and put in new ones, but the reality bites.

Your printer may actually use one or several cartridges (from one in monochrome laser printer to eight in professional color inkjet printer), generally two (black and color) or four separate color cartridges. Since inks or toners in cartridges are not consumed evenly, it is rarely that you have to replace the whole set of cartridges at once. Even if so, buying only four cartridges should not seem such a problem, however this is where the most interesting part begins.

Visit your local computer store and you will likely find out there are way too more cartridges for your printer, not just four as you might think. What are all these cartridges and how to choose the right ones, that’s the question.

To be sure you are making the right decision when choosing thes or those ink and toner cartridges, you should be well informed of what is what and who is who. For starters, you should know there are three types of cartridges: OEM, compatible and remanufactured. The thing to remember is that not every cartridge type is available for every printer model.

OEM cartridges

OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) cartridges (also known as original or genuine) are made by the manufacturer of the printer for which it is intended. For example, an HP OEM cartridges have been specifically created by HP for use in HP printer, copiers or faxes.

These are very much the same cartridges that you got with your printer. With them, you can be assured of producing prints with the same color and quality as you did with your original cartridges. Original manufacturers claim they have put a tremendous amount of time, knowledge and technology into OEM cartridges to deliver the best quality of print. This is on the one hand.

On the other hand, these very time, knowledge and technology justify, according to original manufacturers, the cost of the genuine cartridges. Yes, of all type of cartridge original are the most expensive. Sometimes it will cost you more to get a set of replacement cartridges than to buy a new printer.

Compatible cartridges

Compatible cartridges also referred to as “off-brand” or “generic”, are cartridges manufactured by a company other than the printer manufacturer. Compatible printer cartridges are brand new alternatives to the OEM or original cartridges. They are not simply identical copies of genuine cartridges produces by side manufacturer, and have different design to avoid violating any copyrights. However, compatible cartridges are still 100% compatible with whichever printer they were designed to fit.

There is another case for compatible cartridges. Some printer models of different brands are based of the same engine. For example, early model of HP LaserJet printers were build using an engine made by and utilized in machines of Canon. Thus, “unintentionally” some HP and Canon cartridges were compatible and could be used in place of one another.

Good thing about compatible cartridge is the price. You can save up to 50% and more on compatible cartridges over OEM. Besides, the compatible cartridges manufacturers promise, like, “their unique combination of components coupled with superior manufacturing processes and stringent quality control guidelines will provide superior print quality and guarantee to consistently meet and even exceed OEM performance”.

If they both cheap and good, why don’t everyone use compatible cartridges? The truth is, theoretical “superior print quality” in reality can vary from one manufacturer to another. Poorly sealed toner cartridge can spill printer toner or ink formulation can cause some minor and not-so-minor color differences. However, don’t think that all compatible cartridges are like that. The quality of work and part depends on actual manufacturer. Find the one you can trust.

Remanufactured cartridges

Remanufactured cartridges are typically created for printers such as HP, Lexmark, Epson, Okidata and some others printers that cannot use compatible cartridges for legal reasons. These brands make cartridges that are rather complex and contain all the printing technology inside the cartridge as opposed to it being contained within the printer.

This complex technology cannot be legally copied, so instead recycling companies collect the empty cartridges, strip them down, clean them out, refill them and then fully test them before sending the cartridges on to vendors. You can find out more on the remanufactured cartridges by reading about the truth and myths of remanufactured cartridges.

Like the compatibles, remanufactured cartridges are often cheaper than OEM cartridges. The savings is usually not as great because remanufactured cartridges cannot be inherently mass-produced. Nonetheless, a seasoned customer can easily find savings of 50% in some cases.

Quality of remanufactured cartridges also can vary from one re-manufacturer to another. Some simply “drill and fill”, literally. They make a hole in the cartridge, fill it with ink or toner, and cover the hole. However, a good toner re-manufacturer has a full quality control process for cleaning, filling, reassembling and testing.

Now that you’ve learned who is who in the world of cartridges, you can easily pick cartridges that are right for you.

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Seiko Epson Corp. unveiled new multifunctional and color inkjet printers – four consumer models and two business models. All products feature new printheads that enhance inkjet performance and allow for higher printing speeds.

The new printheads include two latest improvements. One is increased maximum volume of ink droplet per ejection – from 7 pL to 11 pL. Previously, droplet volume per ejection ranged from 1.5 pL to 7 pL, now it ranges from 1.5 pL to 11 pL. The company said, this became possible due to increased volume of ink chamber in the printhead and enlarged pressure plate transmitting the displacement of piezoelectric element.

The other improvement is modification of the drive frequency, which corresponds to the number of ink ejections in a unit of time. The frequency was increased from 45 kHz to 60 kHz thanks to new design of ink flow in the printhead. According to the company, these two improvements increased t the inkjet performance as much as twice.

For example, the printing speed of one of the new color multifunctional printers, PM-A840, is 5.5 sheets per minute when measured by using the standard test pattern on A4 paper (J1) (I assume it’s a color photo test) specified by Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA), while that of the existing model, PM-A820, is 3.7 sheets per minute under the same condition.

The time required to print an L-size photograph by using PM-A840 is 22 seconds, which is 3 (oh my God!) seconds faster than that required by PM-A820.

The business-use color printer, PX-V780, employs the new printhead and two nozzles for black ink. As a result, the printer was able to produce 37 A4 monochrome sheets per minute, which is roughly the equivalent of a laser printer, Epson said.

Modern printers are much smarter than the original printing devices they were like, say, 10 years ago. Aside from just printing, they can scan, copy, send faxes, automatically connect to the Web for software updates, and so on. The only thing printer couldn’t do was translation. Not until now.

Fuji Xerox Corporation developed a technology that enables laser printers and copiers to translate the text to be printed. The idea behind the technology is simple — the printer scans a sheet of text, and then connects to a dedicated server on the internet where the text is translated and sent back to printer for output. The translating algorithms on the server can distinguish between text, drawings and lines, so page layouts remain.

So far, only four languages are available for translation: Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English.

The laser printer is still a prototype and the technology will take time be refined to be ready for market. No information is yet available as for the quality of the translation, hopefully it will be better than that of Babel Fish or Google Translate.

It stroke me as curious that Mitsubishi, apart from cars and conditioners, also makes printers. There is a whole separate company – Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America Imaging Products – that is responsible for producing printers. The other day the company announced Mitsubishi CP-9800DW digital photo printer that “offers high-grade picture quality at even faster output speeds, making the unit an even more powerful revenue-generator for professional photographers.”
Mitsubishi CP-9800DW prints 4 x 6-inch photo in 8.7 second, which makes up 100 prints in 15 minutes, or 400 prints per hour. All in all, the printer supports four print sizes – 3.5 x 5 inches, 4 x 6 inches, 5 x 7 inches, and 6 x 9 inches – with edge-to-edge printing.

The printer employs a proprietary high-density, highefficiency thermal head that provides a 300 dpi resolution.

Poor news. The sexy Samsung printers – the ML-1630 and the SCX-4500 – reported in previous post will only be available for Apple computers, according to Wired.com Blog. This is really sad, I wish I could buy one for my PC. On the other hand, the news seems like an arguement for buying a Mac, doesn’t it? Here is the press-release by Samsung:

EW SLEEK, ULTRA-COMPACT SAMSUNG PRINTERS TO BE SOLD EXCLUSIVELY AT APPLE RETAIL STORES

World’s most compact printers are both stylish and easy to use

IRVINE, Calif., September 18, 2007

Samsung Electronics America, Inc., the world’s second largest manufacturer of laser printers, today announced that its ultra-compact monochrome laser printer, the ML-1630, and multifunction printer, the SCX-4500, will be available exclusively at Apple Retail Stores nationwide and online at www.Apple.com. These two new printers are perfect products for consumers who value both style and functionality. The devices – which are two-thirds the size of traditional laser printers – feature high-glossy and seamless exteriors that create a truly ultra-minimalist design. Samsung’s new, innovative laser printers meet consumer demand for reliable electronics that aesthetically harmonize with any office or home environment. The ML-1630 and
the SCX-4500 will be sold exclusively at Apple Retail Stores until they are widely released in January 2008.

“Samsung is consistently looking for opportunities to enrich and diversify the global printer market,” said Jang-jae Lee, Senior Vice President of the Digital Printing Division, Samsung Electronics. “In turn, we are thrilled to team up with Apple, a true leader in its field, for the U.S. release of our newest printers. The ML-1630 and the SCX-4500 include button-less touch-sensor panels that reduce the user interface. Plus audible alerts and blue LED scan-process indicators ensure that the devices are extremely user-friendly.

“Among electronic products, printers are very complex and sophisticated,” said Jun Won Bae, Senior Designer, at Digital Printing Division of Samsung Electronics. “In turn, we wanted to create a printer with a simple exterior design that would serve as a counterbalance to its interior complexity.”

“Samsung has taken the printer – which is often considered as an add-on device – to an entirely new level of artistic refinement,” Lee added. “These days, consumers are looking for products that are not only functional, but that also reflect their own personal styles.” Samsung’s new printers will available at Apple Retail Stores and apple.com.

MSRP is $299 for the SCX-4500 and $199 for the ML-1630.

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Every time we go online, we expect the web to give us something new. Some news we receive “automatically”, like the e-mail messages from your friends or newsletters from your favorite website. Other information doesn’t come easy. To find it we often have to make a search.

The search is what modern Internet relies on. Searching engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN has become an integral part on everyday life online. Can you imaging yourself digging through billions and billions of web pages looking for, once we’re into printers, the specification of a new printer or printer cartridge compatibility? Neither can I, and that’s why we all love searching engines – they are here for us trying to provide most relevant results.

However, it’s not only the search engines that are expected to provide effective search.

Now let’s fancy another situation: you’re up to buying something online, let it be toner cartridges (remember, we’re still into printers). If you have a favorite printer cartridges store, you would go there and make a purchase. If you don’t have a favorite store, I suppose you would use a searching engine to find one, and let’s suppose you have. What you’ve just done is made a search — selected one shop from thousand of others. The only thing left to do is to find those very cartridges for you particular printer.

Do you know how many ink and toner cartridges exists? I’ m not sure there is an exact figure, but for what I know, average online printer supply store sell 3-5 thousand cartridges. I believe no one argues that every online store selling more than even a hundred different items should have a good search, or, at least, have the products categorized convenient and well. You would get to like a store where you can find the product you need fast and easy, wouldn’t you?

What I’m going to tell you is not just singing praises to the online store of Toner Cartridge Depot. In fact, this printing supplies outlet does feature powerful search and handy navigation. Treat it like a guide to shopping with Toner Cartridge Depot.

So, let’s assume you got to this store while searching for printer cartridges. What’s next? From now on you have several ways to find your supplies.

The Catalogue

On the main page, right before your eyes is the list of manufacturers/brands.

Generally, these are who made your printing device you are looking supplies for (though there are some who don’t make printers themselves, but only cartridges for other’s printer). Clicking the required brand (say Hewlett Packard) will take you further to next page.

Here you can see types of devices produced by given manufacturer and model families existing for each type. The printer’s family name is usually written on its case. For instance, if you have an HP Color LaserJet 4500 printer, “Color LaserJet” would be the family name. Select your model family to move on. You landed on a page with a list of models existing within given model family.

Now you are one click away from the supplies you need. All you have to do is to select your printing device model. If you are not sure what the model’s name and number are, check them on the front panel of device’s casing. So choose the model and see what supplies we got for it. Apart from genuine supplies, a range of compatible and remanufactured cartridges is often available for some most popular printer models. As a rule, they are a bargain purchase, so you may consider them as well.

The Quick Supplies Finder

This is a very handy navigation tool that allows you to find printer cartridges pretty much like in the Way 1, unless you don’t need to move from one page to another. Quick Supplies Finder is a set of three dropdown menus: the first menu selects a brand, the second one selects a device type, and while the third menu helps you chose your model. Having chosen the model, you will be transferred to a page containing supplies for that printing device model.

The Search

Finally, Way 3, the highlight of today’s performance, the Toner Cartridge Depot search algorithm. This is a small input field in the top bar in upper-right corner of a page, but it’s more than meets the eye.

The search is easier when you know what you are looking for, be it printer model or printer cartridge number. You simply enter one or the other into search filed and press enter. Should there any matches, you will see them in search results.

But what if you, somehow, don’t know either model of your printer or the cartridge number? That’s pretty unusual situation, but the search rates just all right against general queries. Let’s suppose, you have some laser printer by HP and you ran out of color toner. Natural thing to search is “color toner cartridges for HP”. Voila! The search returns only color cartridges for laser printers made by HP. Additionally, you can narrow your search by several criteria like color, brand, supplies yield, condition and type. Oh, almost forgot! Also, you may sort the search results by order, description, price or quantity to be added.

In given example below, you can specify the exact color of the toner cartridge you need and its condition:

You can try entering any other queries of your choice or need. You are welcome to let us know if you get unexpected results.

Here is another example of expanding application of inkjet technology. Last week Hewlett Packard announced that it had used its ink-jet printer cartridge technology to create a patch that releases drugs through the skin in a controlled and painless way.

The company said it has entered into a licensing agreement with Crospon, an Irish medical device developer, who will manufacture the invention and make it available to pharmaceutical firms as soon as 2010.

Patches that deliver medication through skin has long been around, for instance smoking patches. However they didn’t work for drugs that can’t be absorbed through the skin, and could only provide continuous flow of just one medication.

The new patch acts very much like a ink cartridge that squirts different colors. It uses micro-hypodermic needles controlled by a microprocessor to deliver particular drugs below the skin several at specified doses and time. This allows for timing sensitive medication delivery, which means it can be used for the treatment of diabetes, cardiac disease or hormonal imbalances.

The price of the patch is expected to be relatively inexpensive because it is based on the same technology that has long been employed in HP ink cartridges.

Researchers from IBM Corporation in collaboration with scientists from ETH Zurich Science and Technology Universityannounced the development of a new printing method that allows placing nanosize particles on a precise location.

The technology makes it possible to manipulate particles smaller than 100 nanometers, which delivers resolution equivalent to 100,000 dots per inch. Compare that to maximum resolution of 1,500 dots per inch of current offset printers.

IBM cautions the technology has many years to pass before any commercial application is possible. So far, they demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed method by printing an image of the sun. Back then in the 17th century, the sun was alchemist’s symbol for gold, so the researchers used 20,000 gold particles, 60 nanometers in diameter each, to create the image (courtesy of IBM).

This printing process is expected to have a dramatic impact on biomedicine, electronics and information technology, according to ScientificAmerican.com:

Still just a conceptual construct, the nano-printing process could be applied to biomedicine to help screen for diseases by graphically illustrating the locations of, say, cancer cells or heart attack markers in a patient’s body.

In the information technology world, nanoprinting could be used to achieve the controlled placement of catalytic seed particles for growing semiconducting nanowires. Such nanowires are promising candidates for future transistors in microchips.